I'm pretty sure I've seen a bear swiping upwards.

Well you can test that theory in person for me.

Just going to assume it's because a bear mauled the Wolf of Wall Street

My buddy who's a NYC firefighter and about as tech and investment savvy as a toddler - is debating jumping into BTC now. Maybe this thing still has some legs. Although I'm not even sure he realizes how much it's fallen recently.

Alright, time to get to the good stuff

...



http://www.grandforksherald.com/opin...roperty-rights

Sorta curious to know what the age distribution of bitcoinheads is. I'd like to think that the generation of people who remember dotcoms and beanie babies would know better, but probably not.

I think we're at the point where idiot baby boomers are a significant part of the distribution.

In the 2017 United Nations population bereau meeting we estimated the world population increasing from 7.6 billion to 8.9 billion by 2050. In our 2018 meeting we have revised those projections based on decisions made by the executive branch of the US government. We now forecast the world population decreasing from 7.6 billion to 1.4 billion in 2050. Thank you.

The thing I hear over and over from bitcoin backers is they have "done their research" which is usually that they watched some videos on YouTube. So, one of the things that seems qualitatively different about cryptos as opposed to say Beanie Babies is the huge saturation of bull**** / marketing / scams that crypto pumpers can generate on the internet. This is important to recognize as muddying the waters for people who might otherwise spot the bubble.

Now, I've said again and again that cryptos and the blockchain technology have uses to facilitate black and grey market transactions and that's a legitimate thing.

But even during the Beanie Baby bubble, I think even the people involved in the craze could rationally admit the things were speculative collectibles. One of the things that seems different about the cryptomania is that the backers seem incredibly invested in REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY WHICH WILL CHANGE ZIMBABWE meow chow stuff and all of that is reinforced by thousands of hours of hucksters and libertarians on YouTube prattling on about it.

Not to get all "Yuval Harari Sapiens is the framework to understand everything" again, but it sort of proves the power of fictions and political ideology to work hand in hand to meaningfully shape reality. That is: tons of highly motivated libertarians and adjacent scammer types are fueling endless content for buyers to consume as "research" which gives a bunch of entirely empirically questionable and dubious (see the people prattling on about Zimbabwe ITT) assumptions which are now deeply, deeply held beliefs. So long as the fictions can persist, there's no reason why people won't covet cryptos, and so long as the people desire them, the value can stay inflated over whatever the 'fair' price is for the functions the things actually provide.

Some jabronis are going to read this as a sick burn against libertarians and cryptos, and a smarter critic will appreciate this is a deeper burn against organized religions, and from a certain perspective, I mean it be a little critical. But we should give them *a little credit* here and I say this in that spirit: Glibly put, a bunch of highly motivated libertarian / paranoids are generating so much ****ing YouTube content that they can manufacture billions of dollars of value of pretend coins out of thin air. Joe Sixpack, Grandma and the guy liquidating his 401k to put it all in Bitcoins are being compelled to do it in huge part by homespun YouTube videos crafting fictions about why BTC is so desirable.

You can make a bunch of other social commentary from here about how modern America is wedded to get-rich-quick investments and other assorted cons due to the fact all real wealth is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people and made inaccessible to everyone else, creating an increasingly desperate population ripe for exploitation like this. Also, remember blockchain sits atop of a generation of venture capitalist and techbro propaganda about how this and that revolutionary technology are going to create the singularity and send us off into the Matrix hand in hand in a perfect world -- another facet of a population absolutely primed for "blockchain will CURE POVERTY IN AFRICA AND TOPPLE THE GLOBAL AUTOCRACY" scam rhetoric since they've been exposed to this bull**** for the last 10 years of TEDTalk tech utopia stuff and whatever else.

So beyond the 'facilitates black market transactions' uses of cryptos, the above is a huge and real difference between cryptos and Beanie Babies / tulips: As the totem of an ideological project of tons of shut-in Aspergers types who are investing huge amounts of effort evangelizing cryptos on YouTube and recruiting fellow believers. Beanie Babies had none of that sort of commitment from people who can sit around all day on YouTube and reddit generating hours upon hours of highly ideological, almost fanatical content to consume about the spiritual essence of pretend coins and their importance to the future of humanity.

Don't really know enough on the subject to comment but like Dvaut's commentary, though I think highlighting the youtubes is a little over the top, and most coin "investors" are probably speculators (either fish or sharks) who don't care about the utopianism.

It's funny that you mention "research", as informed research into fundamentals has led to a lot of fortunes in finance (as has putting chips on red), and was/is perhaps the predominant "safe" strategy through the 90s and maybe still. Heck, three of the biggest finance whizzes did serious work in philosophy before finance, including Soros, Ican, and Bill Miller (who just donated 85m to Johns Hopkins philosophy dept, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/a...kins.html?_r=0). There's a lot of information available in the world and separating the wheat from the chaff is a valuable skill, as is raising the money and having the guts to make big bets when the deck is favorable.

Not much point other than there's a difference between research and "research", whether in science, medicine, investing, or just about anything else. What you want is research that's casually significant for the metric you're interested in, which requires an understanding of a domain that more or less tracks, or at least covaries with, reality.

edit: with specific regard to bitcoin/crypto, I have this https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/m...bble.html?_r=0 open in a browser tab and hope to get around to reading it, though it's not a subject I plan to go deep into. Also, have to read the Kalecki essay Dvaut suggested, which is open another tab.

It does seem like there is a gigantic regulatory shoe to drop on all of this. If the securities regulator declares Bitcoin to be a security and implements a proper regulatory regime around it, Bitcoins will behave like common shares (marketing subject to disclaimers, dealing only on regulated exchanges, sales only by registered investment advisers). None of that is a rock solid guarantee that no misleading will occur (obviously) but it would definitely take the wind out a market fed by Youtube "research".

At least in the US, I wouldn't hold your breath on Trump Admin regulators taking an interest any time soon:



As I said, this is pretty ideological now. It seems like crypto is folded pretty neatly into various right-wing longcon scams and pitches.

I still maintain that the crypto evangelists swear up and down regulation is completely pointless and ineffectual anyway, so I'm not sure where that leaves us on that front. I am intrigued that the crypto prices are apparently quite sensitive to even rumors of say Asian regulators which precipitated the ~25% drop in price this week.

That article is unnecessarily long just for the sake of being long, and I already posted the cliffs up-thread. Nobody has any real world uses for a blockchain and they're all chasing the same vague technotopia Wired magazine started evangelizing a quarter century ago.

On beanie baby issue , I think I have a unique insight in that as a kid I owned a lot of beanie babies and they taught me something horrible about myself which I won't mention here.

So anyway on to the insight. A long time ago I made a trade that turned out to be incredibly
Brilliant. I basically traded 500 dollars of cards for 300 dollars of cards. But those 500 dollars are worth 400 dollars now and the 300 dollars were worth 4K when I sold them. I think this is very relevant to bitcoin.

I actually just realized despite being an alcoholic mental patient I understand bitcoin better than 95% of the population for real. I've d cider there's a lot of money for me to make in bitcoin like 3 mins ago.

Found out someone I vaguely know is bitcoin rich, her holdings were about 1.5 million euros last week after having bought several Ks worth a few years back. She was thinking of cashing out in December but found out that she would be taxed on it, so decided not to. It seems she got the impression the tax was due to the French authorities not 'getting' bitcoin yet, and so if she waited a bit longer then she'd be able to get out and keep the lot.

There's obviously different tax regimes for different ways of making money, and I'm sure tax authorities are still trying to figure out where exactly bitcoin does and should fall, but I tried to say that being taxed on investment gains was normal so was unlikely to disappear, but I don't think got anywhere. I don't know much about these things, anyway, maybe this coming change in the tax code is why bitcoin is so great!

I remember my mother bringing it up in conversation with me as though she was contemplating investing in it on her own. I had to talk her out of getting involved because she would almost certainly **** it up and throw herself into bankruptcy chasing after the supposed easy money.

"I don't want to pay taxes on my free money" is one of the more hilarious justifications for not cashing out.

I get that the internet gives people a rabbithole of crank youtubes and reddit pages people can fall into, but still the basic core mechanics of this are so similar to past situations. When Ron Paul is hawking Bitcoin IRAs, there just has to be some part of you that says "hey, I've seen this movie before," unless maybe you're a millennial who tuned out the dotcom era because you were busy playing starcraft.

It's like, that guy who chased in his 401k to buy crypto because he was "only" getting 20% returns and didn't realize there's a withdrawal penalty... just seems like there has to be some point maybe in your mid-to-late-20s when you pick up a basic working knowledge of how this all works.

Justification level of bubbles imo:

Dotcom
South Seas Bubble
Railroad stocks/canal stocks/radio stocks/etc

...
...

Roaring 20s
Gilded age

...
...

Mortgage derivatives

...

Various gold and silver rushes

...
...
...
...

Crypto

...
...

Tulips
Beanie Babies

...

Straight up pyramid schemes

On this whole "research" idea - if you have to research an investment vehicle just to buy and hold it w/o disaster - you are the greatest fool at that point. No uncles or housewives are going to come along behind you. On the flip side, once Coinbase makes it easy for uncles and housewives - what was the point of all that research?

I think a gigantic component to this is crypto kiddies feeling cool for knowing how to air-gap their e-wallet. That might make sense for a new world order where crypto kids have a leg up on everyone else. But it doesn't make sense for crypto as an investment vehicle nor as an everyday currency for the masses. And which is it supposed to be anyway?

There's nothing wrong with researching investments to figure out how to reduce fees and ****. It's just a question of basic information literacy and knowing that boring-ass normie investment professionals are probably more reliable than yootoobes and redit memes.

Maybe this is just a constant feature of the Internet, that it incubates failed ideas of the past, which is why we're seeing a resurgence of libertarians, Neo-Nazis, and dubious investment schemes.

I'll give the dude a pass on this. I have a routine where I remove my glasses right before I take off my shirt, and I've lost count of how many times I've tried to take off glasses that were not there out of habit.

Can't wait for Amazon to pick Austin and destroy whatever charm the city has left.

lol these poor lads just cannot catch a break